Litigation and other dispute resolution processes usually involve paper intensive proceedings. The parties to a dispute must file paper documents with a court or other tribunal and provide copies of the same documents to other parties. The proceedings thus require generation of multiple copies of many paper documents and manual exchange of them. With only paper copies of documents, the parties do not have the opportunity or advantage of computer-based approaches to manage documents electronically and perform various functions on them such as searching.
Some legal resource providers have attempted to provide for electronic exchange of litigation-related documents requiring participation of courts. However, the courts usually have little if any incentive to require that parties provide electronic copies and make them available to a third-party for distribution to others. Without substantial court participation, these providers can only maintain a small fraction of the vast amount of litigation-related documents exchanged every day. Accordingly, a need exists for management and exchange of litigation-related documents without requiring participation of courts or other tribunals.